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Aurea Calica
Philippine Star

The Senate ratified the Charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) yesterday.

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. rejected the Charter on grounds that military-ruled Myanmar refuses to free pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Sixteen senators vzoted for the ratification of the Charter: Manuel Villar Jr., Jinggoy Estrada, Francis Pangilinan, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Juan Ponce Enrile, Benigno Aquino III, Manuel Roxas II, Jamby Madrigal, Loren Legarda, Francis Escudero, Joker Arroyo, Pia Cayetano, Ramon Revilla Jr., Lito Lapid, Gregorio Honasan and Richard Gordon.

Five were absent: Panfilo Lacson, Rodolfo Biazon, Alan Peter Cayetano, Edgardo Angara and Juan Miguel Zubiri.

Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV is imprisoned at Camp Crame in Quezon City, while Alfredo Lim is now the mayor of Manila.

Pimentel said he could not see how the Charter, even with the establishment of a human rights commission, could force Myanmar to democratize and recognize the rights of its people.

“The (human rights commission) would be a sham and hypocrisy on the part of Myanmar, it will not mean anything to them,” he said.

“That is why I do not wish it said that ASEAN is just closing its eyes to the atrocities of the ruling junta against its own people and in effect, we are legitimizing them in the eyes of the world.”

The Senate committee on foreign relations chaired by Santiago recommended the ratification of the Charter.

Santiago said the ASEAN Charter will speak out on humanitarian or self-defense events, such as the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.

“We wish it were a more perfect document, but because of the variated cultures of our region, it is very difficult to get a consensus on a document that will govern with legal force the affairs of these member governments. That’s the best we could do at this moment,” she said.

Santiago said the ASEAN Human Rights Body would enable ASEAN to stop depending on foreign human rights monitors.

“The Charter also enshrines the

so-called ASEAN way of settling differences, meaning consultation and consensus,” she said.

“This is the basic decision-making principle in ASEAN. If all 10 member-states ratify the Charter by December, it will enter into force in 2009.

“Thus, ASEAN will ratify its constitution even ahead of the European Union, whose charter was rejected by two countries.”

Of the 10 ASEAN members, seven have already ratified the Charter, with the Philippines being the eighth.

Indonesia and Thailand are still in the process of ratification.

ASEAN comprises the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

It was the Philippines that first proposed the ASEAN Charter in the 1970s.

The ASEAN Charter is a treaty and therefore becomes binding on the Philippines after the Senate ratifies it, Santiago said.

Juan T. Gatbonton Editorial Consultant
Manila Times

Rapprochement between China and its estranged province of Taiwan—promised by the election of the Kuomintang’s Ma Ying-jeou to the presidency of the “Republic of China”—removes a bone stuck in Asean’s throat.

Since the Korean War, Taiwan has been the only flashpoint that could ignite a US-China-Japan conflict. And among all the Asean states, the liability of high-tech war across the Taiwan Straits has been scariest for us. The island is so close that Batanes folk say you could almost hear the cocks on the island crow.

China’s last irredentist claim

Taiwan is China’s last major irredentist claim. Nominally part of the Empire since the 10th century, it had been lost to Japan in 1895. For the Americans, Taiwan is just as crucial. Since the 1890s, Washington’s Pacific strategy has been to ensure the group of islands enclosing the China Sea remains in friendly hands.

The Asean states accept that Taiwan is a Chinese province. Formally, they are concerned only with how it is reunited with the mainland. But—if the truth be told—Asean’s wishful hope is for the status quo on the island to continue for as long as possible. Because resolution of the Taiwan issue in China’s favor will enable it to dominate the South China Sea—huge tracts of which it already claims—but which Asean regards as its own maritime heartland.

The naval balance of power

Rather than Taiwan itself, control of the Taiwan Straits and the China Sea does seem the real issue among China, the United States and Japan. As in the days of the 19th-century naval strategist, Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the primary object of American policy in East Asia still is to prevent the rise of a regional superpower.

Mahan and his disciples in Washington’s power elite regarded the projection of American power into the Western Pacific—apart from signifying their country’s emergence as a great power—as a strategy of “forward defense.” That was why Theodore Roosevelt—then secretary of the Navy—had ensured Dewey’s Asiatic fleet was within striking distance of Manila Bay well before the Spanish-American War began.

America’s Atlantic coast was protected by friendly Europeans. But the East Asian mainland and the first group of islands enclosing the China Sea were occupied by peoples alien to the Americans ethnically and culturally. So that it is from there that an invasion of the American mainland would threaten.

Mahan’s fears did come true. In December 1941, the audacious Japanese devastated both America’s Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and its forward airbase on Luzon Island. And no sooner had the Japanese lunge toward the American homeland been stopped—just short of Midway Island—than China “stood up” under Communist rule.

Challenging the status-quo power

Nowadays the US-China rivalry resembles that between the hegemonic maritime power, Great Britain, and the rising land power, Germany, beginning in the late 1800s.

Just as Britain tried to contain Germany’s economic and military power, so did Germany try to break Britain’s naval superiority. But, in our time, this natural rivalry must be played out with the greatest subtlety—if only because the potential costs of nuclear conflict are so high.

Pentagon strategists have been shifting the weight of their overseas deployments from Europe to the Pacific. Chinese strategists themselves apparently use as the dominant contingency in their planning and weapons development a war with Taiwan that involves the United States.

A land power since the 15th century, China is developing its air-refueling and maritime capabilities—the first steps in transforming its coastal defense force into a fleet capable of projecting power over great distances.

Taiwan’s integration well along

Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, Taiwan has come to depend for its prosperity on China’s workers and markets. Taiwanese companies have invested more than $100 billion in the mainland; and more than a million Taiwanese live there. But meanwhile Taiwan’s middle class has also been moving away from its commitment to the proposition that the island and the mainland are parts of one country.

Over this last 10 years, the “Taiwanese” and “Chinese” positions on the sovereignty issue have at times been so disparate that the risk of war had been real. In 1996, two US carrier groups damped down aggressive Chinese military exercises aimed at preventing the re-election of “Taiwanese” President Lee Teng-hui.

What now for the Straits?

US support for Taipei has at times been so unequivocal that its Taiwanese tail had seemed to wag the dog of Washington’s China policy. And Taiwan’s restoration to Chinese control could reduce the China Sea to a Chinese lake—and open the Pacific to Beijing’s blue-water ambitions.

But, for the moment, continuing rapid growth seems Beijing’s highest priority—both to finance China’s future greatness and to ease its political transition from totalitarian to “soft” authoritarian rule. It has declared that “China and the [United States] have no need to begin a war against each other” over the island, and that even the idea of a loose confederation between China and Taiwan “can be discussed.”

Short of the trappings of statehood, Taiwan will still have a great deal of flexibility, which President-elect Ma could exploit. But Beijing also said China’s emergence, as a regional power, is “irresistible.”

Editor’s note: Notes and Comment appears fortnightly.